The singing cricket
Aesop (or La Fontaine)
At school we learnt a fable in French, about the grasshopper, or cricket, and the ant. It has only just occurred to me that I may have got the wrong end of the stick. The cricket, having been singing all summer, now has nothing to eat, so she goes to ask her neighbour the ant to lend her something to see her through the winter. The ant refuses.
As a child - and not a young child either, because I learnt it by heart in French, and still know it almost word-perfectly - the only conclusion I took from this was that the ant was a mean old friendless thing and I didn't want to be like her. It has just occurred to me for the very first time that maybe I was supposed rather to think the cricket feckless and learn some lesson about providing for the future. Fortunately this interpretation was not spelled out to me. It's only taken about 50 years for me to think of it for myself.
At school we learnt a fable in French, about the grasshopper, or cricket, and the ant. It has only just occurred to me that I may have got the wrong end of the stick. The cricket, having been singing all summer, now has nothing to eat, so she goes to ask her neighbour the ant to lend her something to see her through the winter. The ant refuses.
As a child - and not a young child either, because I learnt it by heart in French, and still know it almost word-perfectly - the only conclusion I took from this was that the ant was a mean old friendless thing and I didn't want to be like her. It has just occurred to me for the very first time that maybe I was supposed rather to think the cricket feckless and learn some lesson about providing for the future. Fortunately this interpretation was not spelled out to me. It's only taken about 50 years for me to think of it for myself.
posted by susanna at 7:11 PM
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